OpenAI Bought a Livestream No One Watches ⇥ garbageday.email

OpenAI’s Fidji Simo:

I’m excited to share that we’ve acquired TBPN. This acquisition brings a team with strong editorial instincts, deep audience understanding, and a proven ability to convene influential voices across tech, business, and culture.

OpenAI and TBPN jointly promise to retain the show’s independence while OpenAI is, according to its press release, “excited to bring their amazing comms and marketing instincts to the team”.

[Alex Valdes][av], CNet:

TBPN launched in October 2024 and has been compared to ESPN in how it covers tech — two guys at a big desk with news, analysis, commentary and banter about topics such as AI, crypto, startups and the defense industry. The show’s two hosts and co-founders, Jordi Hays and John Coogan, have had some of tech’s biggest names in studio — OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, entrepreneur Mark Cuban and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, to name some.

Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day:

Now, Technology Brother #1, Coogan, has written about their desire to remain niche. “If TBPN hits 10M subscribers, something has gone very wrong,” he wrote on LinkedIn last month. “From the very beginning we knew our core audience size: about 200,000 founders, executives, and position players in tech and finance. It may seem small but we were building for a very specialized audience.”

Call me delusional, but I cannot imagine many founders and executives have the ability to watch a three-hour daily livestream. I will not spoil it too much, but Broderick’s theory is pretty reasonable: OpenAI bought it for its nominal authenticity, however manufactured it is.